By Chinoyi Chipulu
National Action for Quality Education in Zambia (NAQEZ), executive director Dr. Aaron Chansa says President Hakainde Hichilema did not announce the number of teachers the government would employ in 2025, rating his Parliamentary speech as 50 percent
And Dr. Chansa also said the last presidential address would be rated at 50 percent because President Hichilema did not talk about pressing issues affecting the education sector.
In an interview yesterday, Dr Chansa said the announcement that more teachers would be recruited was exciting to the education sector because more teachers were needed to end the pupil teacher ratio in the country.
“The only challenge that we have is the President did not give a specific figure especially so we would like the Ministry of Education to update us on the figures and month when we expect the recruitment because we are remaining with a few months before the year ends,” Dr Chansa said.
Dr Chansa said teachers expected President Hakainde Hichilema to guide the nation on how teachers will have their salaries upgraded.
He said the talk on salaries would have motivated the teachers in the country as they had been waiting for this development from the government.
“What was very disappointing from the speech is that the President ignored thorn issues of teacher motivation, because he has been talking about upgrading teachers in rightful salary scales. This time around, he did not say anything about it. People wanted to hear from the President,” he said.
Dr Chansa said it was also disappointing that President Hichilema did not guide on issues of supplying solar panels in schools.
“There was a circular from the Cabinet instructing public institutions to install solar panels but for schools there has never been any directive or financial support to enable schools to do that. So we expected the President to actually guide on that very important aspect,” he said.
Dr. Chansa said the President also failed to guide the nation on the timeframe on the move to set up universities in each province in the country.
“The President has been talking about each province having a university, we hoped that he is going to give a timeframe, when this is going to be actualized but that aspect was also ignored, so we give the speech about 50 percent. He tackled certain things but failed to handle other things so the speech was average,” he said.
He also said the process of distributing desks in schools should be accelerated because the process was too slow.
“Government depends too much on Constituency Development Funds (CDF) which sometimes is very very late and inadequate so we want to see additional support away from CDF,” said Dr Chansa.
